American journalist Kim Barker turned up in Kabul not long after 9/11 without much of an idea what she was doing.

She was swiftly swept up in the maelstrom that is the life of a foreign correspondent, doing the Taliban Shuffle between Afghanistan and Pakistan for eight years for the Chicago Tribune.

Her book chronicles the existence of journalists in war zones – always on the edge and about to crack, careening along on an adrenaline high.
Along the way she gives readers background on the region and lets them peer in on a life that saw her close friends kidnapped, her relationships broken down and all the while, relentlessly hit on by senior Pakistani government officials.

She spoke to me from New York about the importance of telling the story you see, being a woman in a war zone, and bluffing her way through some very bizarre situations.